The present invention relates generally to the field of electronic messaging and, more particularly, to a system and method of personalizing received electronic messages through text-to-speech conversion. Electronic messaging, especially Internet e-mail using protocols such as Post Office Protocol (POP3) or Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) has become extremely popular over the past several years. Besides being able to send plain text messages, users sending e-mail today are able to format messages in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), attach practically any kind and number of supplementary documents or files, including images, executable programs, documents created by a word processor, sound files, video files, and many others. Attachments can be sent in compressed or uncompressed formats. The capability of sending audio files as e-mail attachments has led some users to use e-mail in a manner similar to voice mail.
The present invention provides a system and method for personalizing electronic messages by rendering them to recipients in the voice of a predetermined human speaker. The invention may be implemented by associating with a message payload a set of basis vectors comprising speech parameters derived from the predetermined human speaker.